Setting up proper cookie consent on your WordPress site is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions. While the legal landscape around privacy can seem overwhelming, implementing a solution doesn’t have to be. Off of the back of my in-depth Complianz review, I noticed a gap. In a nutshell, there wasn’t enough on the plugin’s usability. It’s something I’ll put right in this Complianz tutorial.
So, I’ll walk you through a near-complete process of configuring and optimizing Complianz on your WordPress site. If you have any questions about the setup or configuration, you can ping us in the comments section at the end of the post!
Starting with Complianz
The first step is installing the plugin. I’m working with the premium version, although installing the free plugin is even more straightforward—and the concepts of much of my tutorial will apply to both versions.
Much like any other plugin, you can install Complianz through the WordPress dashboard. You’ll also need to activate your license key for the premium version, which you can find in your Account > Downloads dashboard on the Complianz website.
After the install completes, you can access the new Complianz menu item within WordPress. This is your gateway to all the plugin offers.
Initial Setup: The Complianz Dashboard
I talk about the Complianz dashboard in the review, but in short, you’ll see an overview of your compliance status and several important cards highlighting key areas of attention. The Progress card is particularly important, as it guides you through the essential setup steps.
The Progress card will show you if your license is active, whether the cookie scan is complete, if your banner configuration is correct, and if you have the necessary documentation in place.
Activating Your License
If you’re using the premium version, the first task is activating your license. Look for the License item in the Progress table:
Clicking the View button here takes you to the Settings > License screen, where you’ll need to enter your premium license key. Back to the Progress card, this is the time to run through the available setup wizard.
Running the Complianz Setup Wizard
The setup wizard is the heart of Complianz’s configuration process. It guides you through a series of questions about your website, business, and compliance needs. The answers you provide will determine your cookie banner’s behavior, the legal documents generated, and script-blocking settings.
To start the wizard, click the View button next to Wizard completed in the Progress card, or navigate to Complianz > Wizard from the sidebar. The wizard has four main sections:
- General. This is where you enter basic information about your website and organization.
- Consent. Here, you configure the services and plugins you run, state whether you collect analytics, and work with the website scanner (more of which shortly).
- Documents. This section lets you generate and set up privacy statements, cookie policies, and other important documentation.
- Finish. Here, you finalize your setup and review the settings.
As you progress through the wizard, you’ll notice that completed sections get a green checkmark, helping you track your progress.
The scanner that forms part of the wizard and setup pre-fills many configuration options based on the services it detects on your site. So, while there might be a lot of fields to fill out, the scanner cuts down the time you need to achieve a working implementation. For me, it was about 15 minutes.
The number of questions to answer could overwhelm you, but the design and layout of the wizard does its best to keep the process as straightforward as possible. I also like the notifications sidebar, as it can give you some hints and tips for filling everything out in an optimal way.
Given that the setup wizard has dynamic elements, I can’t cover every eventuality. However, I do want to go into each section a little deeper, so you’ll know what to expect.
General Section: Setting the Foundation
The first General section lets you enter essential information about your website and organization:
- Your company or organization name, your contact details, and its entity (i.e. whether it’s a business, nonprofit, or something else).
- The regions where your site operates or has visitors.
- Whether you process sensitive personal data.
- The purpose of your site and whether its design attracts under 13s.
- Data retention policies, your assigned data protection officer (if applicable), and general consent considerations.
This information will help Complianz generate appropriate legal documents and determine which privacy regulations apply to your site.
What I appreciate about the Complianz wizard is that it dynamically adjusts the questions based on your answers. For example, if you indicate that you operate in the EU, you’ll see EU-specific questions about data processing and legal bases.
Consent Section: Configuring Cookie Management
The next section—Consent—focuses on the services and plugins you use that will collect cookies. Here, Complianz will run a scan to automatically identify all of the cookies your site uses. This hybrid scanning approach combines a number of aspects:
- Back end scans of your WordPress installation.
- Front end scans that simulate visitor interactions.
- Integration with Cookiedatabase.org for cookie information.
The scanner will identify cookies from WordPress core, installed plugins, third-party services, and any custom scripts you’ve added. Once it completes, you review the detected cookies and categorize them if necessary:
For each cookie, you can accept Complianz’s suggested categorization or modify it based on your understanding of how the cookie functions. This is crucial as it determines which cookies require explicit consent before activation. I find that the auto-scan does a great job, and I didn’t need to make any changes.
From here, you can move onto creating your legal documents.
Documents Section: Legal Compliance
The Documents section handles all the legal documentation required for privacy compliance. You shouldn’t need to spend too long on this screen because, again, Complianz handles this aspect for you.
Based on the information you’ve provided, Complianz will automatically generate a privacy statement, cookie policy, opt-out preferences, and other region-specific documents. These documents are dynamic, which means they update if you add or remove cookies from your site. You’ll also cause an update if your privacy regulations change or you change your settings in Complianz.
If you use geolocation for regions that require this functionality, the Documents section also provides settings to tweak this to your liking.
Finish Section: Finalizing Your Setup
The final section of the setup wizard is Finish. Here, you get decide whether you show the consent banner and enable script blocking:
This is where most of the magic happens, as Complianz will generate all of the required legal documents and configure your cookie consent mechanism based on the information you provide.
Once you click the Finish button here, you move onto the Consent Banner section.
Customizing Your Cookie Consent Banner
Once you choose to display a consent banner, it’s time to customize its appearance. This is where you can make sure your cookie notice fits your site’s design and brand.
You can find a comprehensive set of customization options on the Consent Banner page. As with the wizard, there are a number of sections here, but this time you don’t have to go through them in a linear fashion. Even so, the workflow is logical, so I’ll go through them one by one.
There’s one section I won’t cover though—Custom CSS. This is a developer level tool that gives you the ability to create a consent banner from scratch using HTML and CSS. It’s a topic the Complianz documentation covers with many articles, and will be essential reading if this is the path you want to take.
General
In this section, you control the overall typical layout and behaviour of your banner. You’ll need to give your banner a title, which the user will never see.
There are other options to choose cookie categories, consent management settings, and whether you disable the consent banner entirely. As an aside, another aspect I like about the wizard and Consent Banner sections are the tooltips alongside some of the settings to help guide you along:
Also, despite the number of tweaks you can make in the Consent Banner screens, you should race through. No sooner than you’re complete with the General page, you can look at Appearance.
Appearance and Colors
As you might expect, these two sections let you control the visual aspects of your banner. I’m bundling them both in here because they relate and you’ll likely switch between them as you refine your design.
First off, you have some simple settings, such as the position of the banner and its width:
You can also give the banner an animation, style the checkboxes, and even set border radii for buttons and boundaries. There are a few toggle switches here too that help you set box shadows, display legal links, and add a close button.
There’s also the option to set up a ‘soft cookie wall’. The concept of this is essentially a way to give your visitors the option to deny cookies without losing access to your site, unlike the typical banner option. Getting into this is beyond the scope of this post, so you’ll want to understand whether your jurisdiction allows for this type of consent.
The Colors tab is straightforward—you choose the colors for elements within your consent banner:
Once you finish up here, it’s time to enhance the readability and clarity of your consent banner.
Texts
The legibility of your consent banner will be as important as its design, as users need to be able to understand what they’re consenting to. This is where you’ll work with the fields and settings within the Texts screen.
I obviously can’t tell you what to write here, but you should at least consider changing the default texts to match your own specific use cases and jurisdictions. It might even be something you consult a legal advisor on, as even the default text may not be binding in the locale you target.
Managing Service, Plugin, and Script Blocking with the Integrations Tab
After setting up your banner, the Integrations tab gives you a set of tools to help restrict aspects of your site that the user doesn’t consent to. One of the most powerful features is the Script Center, which gives you granular control over how you manage scripts based on user consent:
This lets you configure which scripts require consent, and offers options to configure them further:
For the Services and Plugins sections, you will see a list based on the auto-scan from earlier.
Each entry will have a toggle switch that indicates whether a user has to consent to running that service or plugin. Each entry will also have a placeholder in the case of a user revoking consent.
Your Complianz Tutorial is Complete!
Given the review elsewhere on the blog and this Complianz tutorial, I consider myself to have a solid level of experience with the tool. I’ve come up with a few key takeaways for you that let you understand whether it would make a good fit:
- While comprehensive, the setup wizard in conjunction with the Progress card in the dashboard, simplifies your configuration.
- You’ll want to rescan your site often to help maintain compliance as it evolves.
- The balance between ease of use and compliance depth makes Complianz suitable for sites of all sizes.
- The premium version offers substantial value for businesses with more complex compliance needs.
Will you look to implement Complianz on your WordPress site? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments section below!
